Posts Tagged ‘history’

Fascism Becomes Background Noise

Posted: September 3, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

What Happens When Everyone Becomes a Fascist?

There is a word we have become remarkably comfortable using. Fascist.

We use it for politicians, parties, governments, corporations, institutions, strangers online, and people who disagree with us.

Sometimes the accusation is justified. Sometimes it isn’t. That distinction matters.

Fascism is not simply another word for bad politics. It is a historically specific political phenomenon with a documented history, recognizable characteristics, internal variations, and decades of scholarship attempting to distinguish it from authoritarianism, nationalism, populism and other forms of political repression.

The word itself has always been contested. Fascist movements fought over its meaning. Political movements have used it as a weapon. Scholars still disagree about its precise boundaries.

But contested does not mean meaningless.

The more interesting problem is what happens when a historically specific political concept becomes a generalized political insult.

Because if everyone is a fascist, eventually nobody is.

And if nobody is, we may become less capable of recognizing one when we actually encounter one.

Fascism was not Always a Comment-Section Insult

Fascism emerged in the early twentieth century, most famously through Benito Mussolini’s movement in Italy. Nazi Germany developed its own distinctive form, combining authoritarian nationalism with racial ideology, antisemitism, expansionism, and genocidal violence.

The two regimes were not identical, and fascism has never been one perfectly uniform ideology. But that does not mean the word can mean whatever we want it to mean.

Scholars have identified recurring characteristics including ultranationalism, political violence, rejection of liberal democracy, leader-centered politics, the creation of internal enemies, mass mobilization, and visions of national rebirth.

Different scholars weight these characteristics differently. That debate is useful. It reminds us that fascism requires analysis rather than a simple checklist. It also gives us some necessary distinctions.

  • Authoritarianism is not automatically fascism.
  • Nationalism is not automatically fascism.
  • Conservatism is not automatically fascism.
  • Populism is not automatically fascism.
  • Political repression is not automatically fascism.

A politician behaving badly is not automatically fascist. A government making a cruel or unjust decision is not automatically fascist.

And calling someone fascist does not make them fascist. Evidence does. That should be the starting point.

When a Warning Becomes a Weapon

Political language does more than describe reality. It shapes how we interpret it. Calling someone a fascist can therefore be an analytical claim and a rhetorical act at the same time.

It can mean: This person represents a dangerous political tendency. That can be a legitimate warning. But it can also become shorthand for: This person is beyond the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Once that happens, the word stops helping us distinguish political phenomena and starts helping us sort people into moral camps. This isn’t new.

Historian Stanley Payne has examined the complicated “career” of the concept of fascism and the semantic changes surrounding the term since the 1930s. Fascist movements themselves understood the political value of controlling language. Mussolini’s regime worked to attach “fascism” to the state, nation, empire, and political loyalty.

The fight over the word did not begin after fascism. The fight over the word was part of fascist politics itself. Today the word operates inside a different machine.

Social media and cable news reward speed, outrage, tribal identity and certainty. A careful explanation of political characteristics does not travel as quickly as a one-word condemnation.

“Fascist” is efficient. It tells your audience who the villain is. It tells your tribe that you recognize the villain. And it can end the conversation before the investigation begins.

That is where a useful political concept starts becoming political ammunition.

When Everything Becomes Fascism

Imagine a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast.

At first, you investigate. Eventually, you become annoyed. Then you stop listening. That is the danger of semantic inflation.

If “fascist” can mean authoritarian government, corporate power, censorship, a political opponent, an unpopular policy, capitalism, socialism or simply someone we find intolerable, the word can retain enormous emotional force while losing its ability to distinguish one political phenomenon from another.

The result is not merely bad vocabulary. It is bad perception. If everything is fascism, we lose the ability to identify what specifically makes something fascist.

And then something worse can happen. People begin treating the accusation itself as noise. The warning system still works. Nobody listens to it.

That is how a word designed to identify danger can become part of the environment that makes danger harder to see.

Fascism and Capitalism

This is where the history becomes uncomfortable.

There is a popular argument that fascism is simply capitalism in its most extreme form. Another argument is that fascism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. History supports neither simplification. Fascist governments did not simply abolish private enterprise.

In Nazi Germany, private businesses continued to operate. At the same time, the regime exercised enormous control over economic activity, redirected production toward military objectives, destroyed independent labor organizations, and incorporated economic institutions into a political system built around dictatorship, racial persecution, and war.

Businesses participated in processes including the expropriation of Jewish property and the exploitation of forced labor.

The relationship between private economic interests and the fascist state was not simply ideological agreement.
  • Profit mattered.
  • Institutional survival mattered.
  • Access to contracts and resources mattered.
  • Power mattered.

A company does not necessarily need to believe in an ideology to discover that cooperation with the government controlling its operating environment is useful.

Fascism did not require private ownership to disappear. It could subordinate economic activity to political objectives while allowing private businesses to operate and profit.

Nor does that mean capitalism naturally produces fascism. It doesn’t.

The historical lesson is more precise: Private economic power and authoritarian political power can coexist, cooperate, bargain, and become mutually useful without becoming identical.

That relationship is not confined to the history books.

A Recent Example

Look at India.

Recent scholarship has explicitly examined the relationship between Hindutva, fascism, neoliberal development, and global corporate capital. One 2025 Oxford chapter describes contemporary Hindutva as a Hindu supremacist fascist project increasingly intertwined with neoliberal global capital accumulation. Another study of Modi’s Gujarat model describes a political economy combining top-down development, favoritism toward big business, violently practiced Hindu nationalism, and repression of dissent.

Other scholarship is more cautious about the precise fascism label but reaches a related conclusion about the political economy. Research on Modi’s India describes an authoritarian project combining Hindu nationalism with neoliberal policy themes, while a 2023 study of authoritarian neoliberalism in India examines the alliance between right-wing authoritarian forces and neoliberal capital and its effects on labor, inequality and dispossession.

The point is not that India is simply another Nazi Germany. It isn’t. The point is that we now have a contemporary capitalist democracy in which scholars are documenting a relationship between majoritarian nationalism, authoritarian political practices, repression of dissent, market-oriented economic policy and concentrated economic power.

That is worth knowing. It also gives us a better vocabulary. The relationship between authoritarian politics and capitalism does not have to look like a dictatorship abolishing the market.

Sometimes it looks like the market continuing to operate while political power becomes increasingly centralized, dissent becomes increasingly costly, and economic policy increasingly serves particular concentrations of capital.

Turkey provides another example of this broader phenomenon. Scholars studying the Erdoğan era have described the country’s trajectory as “authoritarian neoliberalism,” in which executive centralization, autocratic legalism, cronyism, privatization, commodification, and the criminalization of opposition became intertwined.

That does not make every authoritarian neoliberal government fascist. It does demonstrate something important: Capitalism does not automatically immunize a society against authoritarianism.

And authoritarianism does not require capitalism to disappear. Those two facts are enough to make the relationship worth watching.

What are we looking at in America?

This is where historical comparison becomes dangerous if we stop thinking.

America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. It is not Mussolini’s Italy.

The United States remains a constitutional democracy, and Freedom House continues to classify it as “Free,” even while its 2026 score declined and the organization identified concerns involving political polarization, institutional dysfunction, executive power, political violence, media concentration, and pressure on democratic institutions.

Democratic erosion is not the same thing as fascism.

But “we are still a democracy” does not mean there is nothing worth examining. Several contemporary conditions are measurable.

Trust in the federal government is near historic lows. Pew Research Center found that only 17 percent of Americans in 2025 said they trusted the federal government to do what is right most or all of the time.

Americans increasingly view political opponents through intensely negative emotional lenses.

Political violence is another measurable concern. A 2025 nationally representative study found that 35.6 percent of respondents considered violence justified for at least one of twenty political objectives. The researchers also found that the year-to-year increase was modest and that willingness to personally commit political violence was substantially lower.

Another 15 percent strongly or very strongly agreed that having a strong leader was more important than having democracy.

None of this demonstrates a fascist America. It demonstrates something more useful: authoritarian attitudes, political polarization, institutional distrust, and tolerance for political violence exist at measurable levels within American society.

That is a condition worth examining. It is not a diagnosis.

Follow the Money

The political system also exists inside an economy characterized by substantial concentrations of wealth and economic power.

The Federal Reserve’s distributional data show enormous disparities in ownership of financial assets between the wealthiest Americans and the bottom half of the population. Organized labor is substantially weaker than it was several generations ago.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers were union members. In 2025, the figure was 10 percent. The private-sector rate was only 5.9 percent.

Again, none of this proves fascism.
  • Economic inequality is not fascism.
  • Corporate concentration is not fascism.
  • Declining union membership is not fascism.

But they tell us something about the distribution of power. And that matters because democracy does not exist only inside voting booths.

People encounter power at work. They encounter it when negotiating wages, deciding whether they can leave a job, dealing with dominant employers, confronting concentrated markets, or trying to make their political voices heard.

Economic power can become political power when it becomes sufficiently concentrated. That does not make concentrated wealth fascist. It does mean that any serious examination of modern political power should ask how economic institutions interact with the state.

History gives us reason to ask the question. It does not give us permission to skip the evidence.

The Danger of Looking for a Costume

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand fascism is to imagine that it arrives fully formed.
  • The dictator appears.
  • The uniforms appear.
  • The flags appear.
  • The secret police arrive.
  • Everyone knows what is happening.

History is rarely that clear while it is happening. Political systems are built through institutions. Institutions operate through incentives. And incentives change behavior.

A corporation does not have to become ideologically fascist to find cooperation with authoritarian power useful. A voter does not have to hate democracy to become comfortable with a strong leader. A political party does not have to abolish elections to weaken democratic norms. A government does not have to become a dictatorship overnight to accumulate more power than surrounding institutions can effectively restrain.

This is why historical comparison is useful when handled carefully. History does not give us a script. It gives us patterns worth investigating. And this is where the language problem comes back.

The Word Can Become Camouflage

If every authoritarian politician is simply “fascist,” then authoritarianism becomes a footnote. If every instance of corporate power is “fascism,” then the mechanisms of economic power disappear beneath the label. If every political disagreement is “fascism,” then political repression becomes indistinguishable from ordinary disagreement.

And if every use of state power is “fascist,” we stop asking the most important question: What kind of power is actually being exercised, against whom, and for what purpose?

That question is harder. It requires research. It requires history. It requires following money. It requires looking at institutions instead of personalities. It requires being willing to discover that the people we dislike may not fit the label we wanted to give them. And sometimes it requires discovering that the label fits more closely than we wanted to admit.

That is the uncomfortable part. Because precision is not a shield for our preferred side. It cuts both ways.

So What Should We Call it?

Don’t begin with the label. Begin with the behavior.
  • What is happening?
  • Who has power?
  • How is that power being used?
  • What happens to opposition?
  • What happens to independent institutions?
  • What happens to organized labor?
  • What happens to minorities and designated internal enemies?
  • Is political violence being normalized?
  • Is a leader being elevated above institutions?
  • Is national identity being defined around exclusion and a promise of national rebirth?
  • Are democratic constraints being weakened?
  • Are economic policies being insulated from democratic pressure while concentrated private interests benefit?
  • Are these developments isolated?
  • Or are they reinforcing one another?

Then ask the historical question: Does the pattern actually resemble fascism?

If it does, say so. If it doesn’t, don’t.

The point is not to make the word safer. The point is to make the analysis harder to bullshit.

Recovering the Word

There is a strange irony in all of this. We live in an age obsessed with political labels while becoming increasingly impatient with the work required to understand them.

Everything needs a side. Everything needs a villain. Everything needs a caption. Everything needs to be reduced to a clip that can be consumed before the next outrage arrives.

“Fascist” fits that environment perfectly. One word. Maximum emotional payload. Minimum explanation.

That is precisely why we should resist it. Not because fascism is too strong a word. Because it is too important a word to waste.

Fascism is real. It happened. It killed people. It destroyed institutions. It mobilized ordinary citizens against designated enemies. It subordinated independent organizations. It used violence as politics. It made loyalty to the nation and the leader more important than liberal democratic constraints. And it did not always arrive wearing a costume that announced what it was.

So when the word becomes a generic insult, something more than vocabulary is lost. We lose a piece of our political eyesight. And there is another reason to care.

The modern outrage economy has learned that fear sells. Anger sells. Tribal identity sells.

A frightened population is easier to divide. A divided population is easier to market to. A population that spends all day fighting over which side is fascist has less time to ask who owns the platform, who profits from the conflict, who benefits from the distraction, and what economic and political structures are operating underneath the spectacle.

That does not mean some secret cabal is sitting in a room manufacturing every argument. It means incentives matter. The machine does not need a mastermind. It needs engagement. And we keep feeding it.

That is where the capitalism question becomes impossible to separate completely from the language question. A political culture organized around outrage exists inside an economic system that can monetize attention, conflict, and division.

Political power can become concentrated. Economic power can become concentrated. Media power can become concentrated. And when those concentrations reinforce one another, democracy can weaken without anyone needing to formally announce that democracy has ended.

That is the part worth watching. Not the costume. Not the comment section. Not the person screaming “fascist” loudest.

The structure underneath.

If Everyone is a Fascist, Nobody is

That is not an argument for silence. It is an argument for precision.
  • Call authoritarianism authoritarianism.
  • Call political repression political repression.
  • Call nationalism nationalism.
  • Call economic exploitation economic exploitation.
  • Call concentrated power concentrated power.
  • Call political violence political violence.
  • And if the evidence shows fascism, call it fascism.
But be prepared to show your work.
  • What historical characteristics are present?
  • What evidence supports the comparison?
  • What characteristics are absent?
  • What alternative explanation fits?
  • What incentives are operating?
  • Who benefits?
  • Who loses power?
  • What institutions are being weakened?
  • What happens to people who resist?
  • And what evidence would change your mind?

Those questions do not tell you what to think. They give you something better. A way to think without being handed the conclusion.

Because the greatest danger of turning fascist into a meaningless word is not that somebody gets called a name they don’t deserve. It is that we train ourselves to hear the word and stop listening. And then, when something genuinely dangerous begins operating in plain sight, we may mistake the warning for just another piece of noise.

Fascism does not become less dangerous because we misuse its name. We simply become less capable of seeing it.

So protect the word. Not for fascists. For everyone else. Because political language is a tool.

Use it carelessly, and it becomes a weapon against your own understanding. Use it precisely and it becomes what it was supposed to be all along: a way of seeing power clearly.

When “Woke” Changed Meaning

Posted: August 17, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

The life, transformation, and political afterlife of a word

Few words in American politics can change the temperature of a conversation as quickly as woke.

For some, it means awareness. For others, progressive politics. For others still, it has become shorthand for political correctness, cultural excess, or an ideology they oppose.

The word is the same. The meaning isn’t. That makes woke worth examining.

Not because one side is right and the other is wrong. Its history offers a clear example of what can happen when a word moves from describing an idea to carrying a political identity.

And the story begins long before today’s culture wars.

A Word for Staying Alert

The earliest known written example of “Stay Woke” appears in a 1924 edition of the Houston Informer, a Black newspaper in Houston. C. F. Richardson, the paper’s editor, described “Stay Woke” as contemporary street slang. He wasn’t talking about sleep.

To stay woke meant staying alert. Paying attention. Looking after yourself, your family, your community, and your interests.

The phrase already carried a social meaning. Decades later, blues musician Lead Belly used “stay woke” in connection with the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women.

Again, the phrase carried the idea of vigilance in a society where failing to pay attention could have serious consequences.

The word’s meaning wasn’t simply awake. It was alert to what was happening around you. For Black Americans living within a society structured by racial inequality, that distinction mattered.

Before Politics

My own introduction to the word came from somewhere far removed from politics. I first encountered woke in hippie and jam-band culture, and later in rave, EDM, and music-festival culture. There, being woke could suggest consciousness, awareness, or simply being attuned to something beyond the ordinary.

For years, I listened to an ambient-music YouTube channel called Woke Nation, built around meditation, relaxation, and sleep. At some point, the channel changed its name to Awake Nation. I remember noticing the change because, by then, woke had begun to mean something very different in the political vocabulary I was encountering.

That experience isn’t evidence of what the word meant everywhere. But it illustrates something important about language: the same word can live very different lives in different communities. And woke had already lived several lives before it became one of the most recognizable words in America’s culture war.

Then It Spread

“Woke” remained part of Black American language for decades before moving into mainstream culture. Musicians and popular culture helped carry it beyond its original communities. Social media then gave the phrase an enormous new distribution network. Then came Ferguson.

Following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” became closely associated with the emerging Black Lives Matter movement. The word was no longer circulating primarily within a particular linguistic community. It was entering the national political vocabulary.

Merriam-Webster dates the major expansion of the term’s modern usage to this period. By the early 2020s, the dictionary was documenting another meaning of woke: a pejorative for people perceived as excessively politically liberal or progressive.

Something had changed. But what?

From Description to Label

One way to understand the transformation is to separate description from identity.

Originally, calling someone woke could describe a state of awareness. Someone was awake to racial injustice. Someone was paying attention. Someone understood that something was happening beneath the surface.

As the word entered mainstream political conflict, woke increasingly became a label. It could describe not simply what someone believed, but what kind of person they were presumed to be.

That distinction matters.

A descriptive word tells us something about its subject. A political label can tell us something about the person using it.

This is where the story becomes more complicated than ordinary linguistic evolution.

Words change all the time. Meanings expand, contract, and shift as communities use them in new contexts.

But political actors can also participate in that process. A 2025 peer-reviewed study examining woke describes this phenomenon as politicized semantic change: the process by which political conflict can contribute to a word acquiring a new, politically useful meaning. The researchers traced the changing use of woke across mainstream media, Twitter, and Google searches from 2010 through 2022. Their analysis describes a movement from a term associated with awareness of racial and social injustice toward a pejorative associated with excessive liberalism, hypersensitivity, and perceived ideological oppression.

That distinction is important. The argument isn’t that someone invented a new word. The word already existed. The argument is that its existing meaning became politically contested—and that contestation helped produce a new one.

When a Word Becomes a Signal

This is where woke becomes more interesting than a simple argument about whether the word is good or bad.

Words don’t exist in isolation. They exist between people. A word can describe something. But it can also signal belonging, opposition, suspicion, approval, or contempt. Woke increasingly began doing all of those things at once.

Merriam-Webster’s data illustrates how politically charged the word had become. In 2021, searches for woke spiked repeatedly, including a 4,303 percent increase on November 8, coinciding with its use in election coverage.

The word was no longer merely describing a particular form of awareness. It had become a political signal. Political signals are useful because they compress complicated ideas into something immediately recognizable.

You don’t have to explain which policy you oppose. You don’t have to explain which idea you think has gone too far. You don’t even have to explain what you think your opponent believes.

You can just call it woke. The label does the rest.

A Word Can Have Two Lives

There is an important caveat here. Words change. That isn’t evidence of manipulation by itself.

Language isn’t a museum exhibit. Meanings evolve because people use words differently.

So the fact that woke developed additional meanings is not unusual. What makes this case unusual is the speed and political intensity of the transformation.

The dictionary now records both sides of the semantic divide. Woke can describe being actively attentive to racial and social justice, while another sense describes something considered excessively politically liberal or progressive. Both meanings exist. The word didn’t simply acquire a new definition and discard the old one. It became contested territory. And when language becomes contested territory, conversations can become strangely difficult.

Two people can use the same word while talking about entirely different things. One hears awareness. Another hears ideology. One hears justice. Another hears excess. The argument begins before either person has established what they mean.

What Happened to the Word?

Perhaps the most revealing part of the story is that woke didn’t become politically powerful because it stopped meaning something. It became powerful because it began to mean too many things at once. That made it adaptable.

It could describe a political philosophy, a social movement, an activist, a corporation, a university, a television show, a government policy, or a person. Sometimes it was used sincerely. Sometimes sarcastically. Sometimes as an accusation. Sometimes as a badge of identity.

The word became a shortcut. And shortcuts are useful because they eliminate the need to explain everything underneath them. That is also their weakness. When we substitute a label for an explanation, we may win an argument without ever understanding the thing we’re arguing about.

The Battlefield Is the Meaning

The history of woke doesn’t prove that one political side invented language or that the other side corrupted it. It demonstrates something more uncomfortable. Language itself can become political terrain.

A word begins with one meaning. A community gives it context. A larger culture adopts it. Political movements attach themselves to it. Opponents redefine it. Media ecosystems amplify it.

Eventually, the word can become less useful for describing an idea than for identifying which side of an argument someone belongs to. That’s when language stops merely carrying information. It starts carrying identity.

Perhaps that is the more important lesson hidden inside the history of one small word. The next time someone calls something woke, the useful question may not be whether the label is correct.

It may be simpler: What, exactly, do you mean by that word?

Because before we can argue about an idea, we have to agree on what we’re talking about. And sometimes, the fight over the word is the first fight we have to understand.

The Politics of the Commons

Posted: August 13, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

What happens when a society starts asking whether everything should have a price?

For most of the last century, socialism carried a particular weight in American politics. It was less a political philosophy than a warning label.

Socialism meant government control. Communism. The Soviet Union. Central planning. Bread lines. The loss of individual freedom. For generations of Americans, the argument was settled before it began.

Capitalism meant freedom. Socialism meant the opposite. But something has changed.

In 2025, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor of the nation’s largest city. He was sworn in on January 1, 2026. A political label that once made national candidates nervous had become part of a winning campaign for one of America’s most prominent political offices. Mamdani is not the beginning of this shift.

Bernie Sanders spent years making democratic socialism part of the American political conversation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped turn that conversation into a generational movement. In August 2026, progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, another sign of the political left’s growing influence, although El-Sayed himself is better described as a progressive than a democratic socialist.

The left is not simply talking about socialism anymore. It is asking voters to govern with some of its ideas.

But perhaps the more interesting question is not whether America is becoming socialist. It is why socialism has become politically thinkable again.

Because Americans have been having this argument for a very long time. Sometimes, we just haven’t called it socialism.

The Things We Already Share

Imagine introducing the public library to America today.

A politician proposes building a publicly funded institution where anyone can walk inside, borrow books without paying, use computers, access the internet, attend programs, or simply sit somewhere warm. There is no profit requirement. The service exists because we have decided that access to information benefits the community.

Would we call that socialism? Probably not. We call it a library.

The same is true of fire departments. Nobody asks whether a burning house is profitable enough to justify putting it out. We decided that fire protection is a public good. So we tax ourselves to maintain the institution before anyone needs it.

The same principle applies to public schools, roads, sanitation systems, parks, public transit, and countless other institutions.

The point is not that a library is secretly socialism. It isn’t. The point is that America has never operated according to a pure market model.

We have always maintained a commons: resources, institutions, and services we collectively decide should exist for public benefit. The argument has never really been whether the commons should exist. The argument is where its boundaries should be.

America Has Been Here Before

History makes the argument more complicated.

When Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. The federal government responded by dramatically expanding its role in American economic life.

The New Deal created programs for employment, infrastructure, financial regulation, agricultural support, and social insurance. The Social Security Act of 1935 established federal old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and assistance for vulnerable Americans.

The United States did not become a centrally planned socialist economy. Private property remained. Private enterprise remained. Markets remained.

But Americans increasingly accepted that some economic risks were too consequential to leave entirely to individuals.
  • Old age.
  • Unemployment.
  • Economic collapse.

The New Deal did not abolish capitalism. It put boundaries around it. That distinction matters. Capitalism and collective provision have never been mutually exclusive in the United States. The American economy has always been a hybrid.

The question has always been how much of that hybrid should belong to the market and how much to the public.

When the Market Becomes the Default Answer

For several decades, American political thought moved strongly in one direction.

Government was increasingly treated as the problem. Markets were increasingly treated as the solution.

There were good reasons for some of this. Markets can be remarkably effective. Competition can drive innovation. Private enterprise can respond quickly to demand. Profit can provide powerful incentives to create things people actually want.

Government can be slow, expensive, bureaucratic, and profoundly incompetent. None of that should be ignored because democratic socialism is having a political moment. But markets have limitations too.

A market does not ask whether something is necessary. It asks whether someone can pay for it. Those are not the same question.

A functioning housing market can coexist with millions of renters spending unsustainable portions of their income on housing. In 2023, more than 21 million U.S. renters, or 49.7% of renters, that the Census calculated, spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

A functioning healthcare market can coexist with enormous medical debt. KFF estimates that Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, including approximately 14 million adults who owe more than $1,000.

And a wealthy economy can coexist with widespread financial fragility. In the Federal Reserve’s latest household survey, 63% of adults said they could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. That means 37% could not. Thirteen percent said they could not cover the expense by any means.

None of those statistics proves that capitalism is inherently bad. They prove something narrower: Economic growth and economic security are not the same thing.

The Price of Being Poor

This may be where the renewed interest in democratic socialism becomes easier to understand. A market economy can feel remarkably liberating when you have the resources to navigate it.

If a service doesn’t work, buy another one. If housing becomes expensive, move. If healthcare is inadequate, find a better plan. If transportation doesn’t work, buy a car. If wages are inadequate, invest.

But those choices depend on something that isn’t distributed equally: the ability to absorb risk.

A person with savings can survive an unexpected bill. A person without savings may have to borrow.

A homeowner with substantial equity has options. A person with no assets has fewer.

A person with inherited wealth can use it as a safety net. A person without it begins an emergency from zero.

This is where arguments about capitalism can become strangely abstract. We talk about markets, incentives, GDP, productivity and efficiency. But economies are ultimately experienced by human beings.

The question isn’t simply whether the economy is growing. It is whether people can build stable lives inside it.

The Wealth Behind the Safety Net

Wealth changes the meaning of risk.

The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show how concentrated household wealth remains. In the first quarter of 2026, the top 1% held roughly 31% of U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50% held roughly 4%.

The composition matters, too. The top of the distribution holds enormous amounts of financial assets that can appreciate, generate income, and be liquidated when necessary. Households with little accumulated wealth have far less room to absorb a shock.

Income pays the bills. Wealth absorbs shocks.

Wealth buys time. It allows someone to leave a bad job, survive unemployment, help a child through school, make a down payment, absorb a medical emergency, or wait for a better opportunity. Without wealth, the same events can become existential. This is why arguments about “personal responsibility” can become incomplete.

Responsibility matters. So does the amount of room a person has to exercise it.

The Label Problem

There is another problem with the debate. Americans do not necessarily agree on what socialism means.

For some, it means public ownership of major industries. For others, it means universal healthcare.

For some, it means stronger unions, higher taxes on wealthy households, public housing, or expanded social programs. For others, it still means Soviet-style communism.

Those are not the same thing. Democratic socialism is not communism. Social democracy is not democratic socialism.

A mixed economy is not a centrally planned economy. And a public library is not evidence that the United States secretly became the Soviet Union.

These distinctions matter because political language can become so imprecise that the label replaces the argument.

There is an important warning here for the left, too. If “socialism” becomes a catch-all word for every policy someone likes, the word loses analytical meaning. If it means everything, it explains nothing.

Democratic Socialism Gets No Free Pass

Taking democratic socialism seriously does not mean giving it a free pass. Quite the opposite.

If the movement wants to govern rather than merely protest, its ideas have to survive contact with reality.
  • How much should government provide?
  • How much should it cost?
  • Who pays?
  • What happens when public institutions become inefficient?
  • What happens when bureaucracy becomes its own interest group?
  • How much taxation is economically sustainable?
  • Where should government stop?
  • What role should private enterprise continue to play?
  • How do we preserve innovation?
  • What happens when a public program becomes an expensive institution that no longer works very well?

Government is not inherently virtuous. Markets are not inherently virtuous.

Both are systems created and operated by human beings. Both have incentives. Both can be captured by powerful interests. Both can become inefficient. Both can produce extraordinary results under the right conditions.

The point isn’t to replace one ideology with another. It is to stop pretending that either system can answer every question.

The Argument for Capitalism

There is, of course, a serious argument on the other side. Capitalism has generated enormous increases in productivity, technological innovation, consumer abundance, and material living standards. Markets coordinate millions of individual decisions without requiring a central authority to determine what people should produce or consume.

Government intervention can solve problems, but it can also create new ones. Regulation can become bureaucratic. Public programs can become inefficient. Taxation can distort incentives. Politicians can distribute resources according to political incentives rather than social needs.

Some problems attributed to capitalism may actually be failures of policy: restrictive zoning, regulatory capture, insufficient housing construction, monopolistic behavior, or poorly designed government programs.

There is also a legitimate philosophical argument that individuals should retain responsibility for some of life’s risks rather than transferring every risk to the state. That argument deserves to be taken seriously.

But it leaves us with another question: How much individual responsibility is reasonable when the consequences of failure can be catastrophic?

Democratic Socialism Meets Reality

This is where Zohran Mamdani becomes more useful than a political symbol.

His administration is now attempting to turn some of the ideas that defined his campaign into municipal policy. Housing is one example.

Mamdani’s administration has proposed creating 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade, with nearly $5 billion in planned investment over two years. It has also proposed a city-backed housing insurance program intended to reduce insurance costs for affordable and rent-stabilized housing.

His fiscal approach offers another test. The proposed FY2027 executive budget totals $124.7 billion. The administration says it closed a $12 billion inherited budget gap through savings, new revenue, and state partnership while avoiding property-tax increases and preserving long-term reserves.

These are not proof that democratic socialism works. They are not proof that it doesn’t. They are something more useful: a test.

If the movement wants to move from ideology to governance, voters now have the opportunity to evaluate what happens when those ideas encounter budgets, bureaucracy, housing markets, competing priorities, and the practical limits of municipal government.

That is how political ideas should ultimately be judged. Not by the label. By the results.

The Real Political Argument

Maybe this is why the current debate feels different from the old Cold War argument.

The question being asked by many voters isn’t necessarily: “Do you want socialism?”

It is: “Why can’t I afford to live?”

Why is housing so expensive? Why does healthcare threaten financial stability? Why can full-time employment still leave someone economically insecure? Why does an economy capable of producing extraordinary wealth struggle to give ordinary people enough room to absorb an ordinary emergency?

Those questions existed before Bernie Sanders. They existed before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They existed before Zohran Mamdani.

Perhaps the political movement isn’t creating the questions. Perhaps the questions are creating the movement.

We should be careful with that conclusion. Political momentum has many causes, and economic insecurity is not the only possible explanation. But the connection is difficult to ignore.

Gallup’s 2025 polling found that Americans overall still viewed capitalism more favorably than socialism. Among Democrats, however, the balance had flipped: 66% viewed socialism favorably compared with 42% who viewed capitalism favorably.

That is not a socialist revolution. It is something more interesting.

A political constituency is becoming less convinced that the existing economic system deserves to be treated as the unquestioned default.

The Politics of the Commons

The argument over socialism may therefore be less about socialism than we think.

It may be about something much older: What do we owe one another?

Every society answers that question whether it admits it or not. We decide that children deserve education. We decide that roads should exist even when individual roads aren’t profitable. We decide that fires should be extinguished regardless of the homeowner’s income. We decide that libraries should lend books without charging by the page.

During the New Deal, we decided that old age and unemployment should not be entirely private risks. We have repeatedly decided that some things are too important to leave entirely to the market.

The disagreement is over where we draw the line. And that line is never permanent.
  • It moved during the Progressive Era.
  • It moved during the New Deal.
  • It moved during the Great Society.
  • It moved during the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century.

And perhaps it is moving again. That doesn’t necessarily mean America is becoming socialist. It may mean Americans are reconsidering what they believe the market is actually for.

Markets are extraordinarily useful tools. But tools have purposes. A hammer is excellent at driving a nail. It is terrible at putting out a fire.

Perhaps the question confronting American politics isn’t whether we should choose capitalism or socialism. Perhaps it is whether we’ve spent so long treating the market as the answer that we’ve forgotten to ask what question we’re actually trying to solve.

That is the politics of the commons.

What Is a Psyop?

Posted: August 7, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

How Influence Became a Battlefield

The most powerful battles aren’t always fought over territory. Sometimes they’re fought over perception.

The word “psyop” is everywhere.

Spend a few minutes in the comments after almost any major news story and you’ll find someone using it. A political campaign is a psyop. A corporate rebrand is a psyop. A celebrity controversy is a psyop. A public health announcement is a psyop.

The word has become shorthand for a simple feeling: “Something about this seems manipulated.”

But that’s exactly why it deserves a closer look. When every attempt to influence people becomes a psyop, the term stops helping us understand the world.

This article isn’t an argument that hidden psychological operations explain every major event. It’s the opposite.

It’s an attempt to understand what psychological operations actually are, where they came from, and what their history can teach us about the modern struggle to shape perception. Because understanding influence shouldn’t make us more paranoid. It should make us more discerning.

A Real Term With a Real History

“Psyop” isn’t an internet invention.

It is shorthand for psychological operations, a documented military capability designed to influence the emotions, reasoning, and behavior of foreign audiences in support of strategic objectives. U.S. military terminology has changed over time, including a period when the Army used the term Military Information Support Operations, or MISO. The Army has since returned to the PSYOP designation.

The important word is specific.

Psychological operations are not simply another word for persuasion. They are not synonymous with advertising, journalism, public relations, or political campaigning. Those activities can influence people. So can propaganda. But the terms are not interchangeable.

That distinction matters because public discussion often swings between two equally inaccurate positions.

One says psychological operations don’t really exist. The other says nearly everything is one.

History supports neither conclusion. The purpose of understanding psychological operations isn’t to see them everywhere. It’s to recognize them accurately when credible evidence shows they exist.

Influence Long Predates the Internet

People have always tried to influence what other people believe. Military organizations eventually formalized that effort.

The U.S. military established a dedicated psychological operations capability during World War I. In 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces created a Propaganda Section, which printed about 5.1 million leaflets and distributed more than 3 million behind German lines before the war ended.

The technology was simple. The idea was not.

Influence what people believe, and you may influence what they do.

Case Study: World War II

During World War II, Allied forces expanded leaflet campaigns across Europe and the Pacific. Some leaflets encouraged surrender. Others warned civilians before military operations.

The objective wasn’t simply to share information. It was to influence decisions before the next battle began.

The methods would change. The objective wouldn’t.

Case Study: The Cold War

The Cold War moved the competition from battlefields into living rooms.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcast news and information into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities responded with censorship and radio jamming. U.S. government records from the period document repeated Soviet efforts to interfere with those broadcasts.

The competition wasn’t only over territory. It was over narratives.

Case Study: Operation Desert Storm

By 1991, psychological operations had become integrated with conventional military planning.

During Operation Desert Storm, coalition forces distributed millions of surrender leaflets and used radio broadcasts and loudspeakers to communicate with Iraqi troops. Army records describe PSYOP efforts as contributing to thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendering. One Army legal handbook cites postwar surveys in which 98 percent of prisoners said they had seen the leaflets and 70 percent said the leaflets affected their decision to surrender.

The objective wasn’t mind control. It was reducing resistance. Influence was being used alongside military force, not instead of it.

Case Study: ISIS

The digital age changed the tools again.

ISIS used online magazines, social media, videos, and targeted narratives to recruit supporters and shape how audiences understood the organization and its cause. Research into its English-language magazine Dabiq found carefully constructed appeals built around identity, crisis, belonging, and an ideological sense of purpose.

The technology had changed from leaflets and radio broadcasts to smartphones and social platforms.

The strategic principle remained familiar: Shape perception. Influence behavior.

What These Examples Actually Demonstrate

These examples don’t prove that every major event is a psychological operation.

They demonstrate something both smaller and more important: The existence of documented psychological operations is not evidence that every major event is one. It is evidence that influencing perception has long been recognized as a strategic capability.

That’s a very different claim. And it is supported by more than a century of documented history.

The Battlefield Expanded

Military psychological operations remain a distinct discipline. But the competition for attention and perception now extends far beyond the battlefield.

  • Companies compete for customers.
  • Political campaigns compete for votes.
  • Media organizations compete to frame events.
  • Activist groups compete for public support.
  • Influencers compete for attention.
  • Platforms compete for engagement.

None of these activities is automatically a psychological operation. But they share a basic reality: People don’t respond only to reality. They respond to their understanding of reality.

And that understanding is shaped by information. This is where the Perception Layer becomes useful.

The Perception Layer

Every major event produces at least two stories. The first is what happened. The second is the competition to define what happened.

Those stories often overlap. They aren’t always the same.

The first question is therefore simple: What happened? Then comes the Incentive Layer: What pressures and incentives shaped the decisions of the people involved?

Then the Perception Layer:

  • How is this event being framed?
  • Which facts receive emphasis?
  • Which receive little attention?
  • What emotions does the presentation encourage?
  • Who benefits if one interpretation becomes dominant?

These questions don’t require assuming manipulation. They require recognizing that interpretation is part of the information environment. And several concepts need to remain distinct.

  • Advertising seeks to persuade consumers.
  • Public relations manages reputation and public perception.
  • Propaganda promotes a cause, ideology, or political objective, often through selective or emotionally charged messaging.
  • Psychological operations are strategic efforts, generally conducted in military or national-security contexts, designed to influence specific foreign audiences in support of defined objectives.

The categories can overlap. They are not the same thing. Precision matters because when every form of influence becomes the same thing, we lose the ability to analyze any of them clearly.

Not Everything Is a Psyop

This may be the most important distinction in the entire article.

Recognizing influence doesn’t mean assuming manipulation. Recognizing propaganda doesn’t mean every message is propaganda. Recognizing framing doesn’t mean objective facts disappear. And understanding psychological operations doesn’t mean every headline is evidence of one.

There are two ways to get this wrong. The first is to see hidden manipulation everywhere. Eventually, every coincidence becomes intentional. Every disagreement becomes coordinated. Evidence stops mattering because suspicion explains everything.

The second is to ignore the documented history of organized influence altogether. Governments have used it. Militaries have used it. Extremist organizations have used it. Political movements have used it.

The existence of organized influence is not a conspiracy theory. Neither is the existence of advertising. Neither is propaganda.

The mistake is taking a real phenomenon and turning it into an explanation for everything. Discernment lives between blind trust and blanket suspicion.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Seeing manipulation everywhere can make people cynical. Seeing it nowhere can make them naïve. Both are vulnerabilities.

If we assume everything is fabricated, evidence becomes meaningless. If we assume nothing is strategically shaped, we become easier to persuade.

The goal is not permanent suspicion. It is disciplined attention.

That means being willing to say: I don’t know yet.

It means separating what is documented from what is inferred. It means allowing evidence to change our minds. And it means resisting the temptation to turn uncertainty into certainty simply because certainty feels better.

A Better Way to Read the World

The history of psychological operations offers a lesson that reaches beyond the military. Power has never been exercised only through force. It can also operate through information, narrative, identity, emotion, repetition, and perception.

That doesn’t mean every message is an operation. It means the information environment deserves to be examined rather than passively consumed.

The next time you encounter a major story, try four questions:

1. What happened?
  • Start with the observable event before accepting someone else’s interpretation of it.
2. What incentives shaped the outcome?
  • Look for systems and pressures before assuming motives.
3. How is this event being framed?
  • Separate the event from the competing stories being built around it.
4. How does this affect ordinary people?
  • Bring the story back down from institutions and abstractions to the people who live with the consequences.

These questions won’t guarantee certainty. No honest method can. But they can slow the rush to certainty. They can encourage better questions. And they can make it easier to distinguish documented evidence from confident speculation.

That matters because we live in an information environment built for speed. Headlines arrive before context. Opinions arrive before evidence. Emotional reactions arrive before people know what happened.

The pressure is always toward an immediate conclusion. We don’t have to accept that pressure.

A psychological operation is not something we should see hiding behind every headline. It is one documented example of a much larger truth: people have always competed to shape what other people believe, and what people believe can influence what they do.

Understanding that history doesn’t require paranoia. It requires awareness.

And perhaps the most useful skill in an age saturated with opinions, instant analysis, and algorithmically amplified outrage isn’t knowing exactly what to think. It’s learning how to investigate before deciding.

The Illusion of Choice

Posted: July 20, 2026 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Why Competition Doesn’t Always Mean Freedom

Walk into almost any grocery store, and you’ll see an aisle full of choices. Twenty brands of cereal. Thirty kinds of toothpaste. Rows of bottled water stretching farther than anyone could reasonably compare.

It looks like competition working exactly as promised. Then look a little closer. Many of those brands belong to the same handful of parent companies. The logos multiplied. The owners didn’t.

Once you see that pattern, it’s hard to stop seeing it.
  • Beer.
  • Airlines.
  • Eyewear.
  • Internet providers.
  • Streaming services.

Different industries. The same story. Competition hasn’t disappeared. It has become harder to recognize.

The same question follows us out of the grocery store and into the voting booth. Every election is presented as a battle for the country’s future. Campaigns spend billions. Ads on television and social media become impossible to escape.

Americans are told the choice has never mattered more. The disagreements are real. The stakes are real. Yet generation after generation, the country returns to the same two political parties.

One grocery aisle. One ballot. One question.

When does competition expand freedom… and when does it simply preserve the appearance of choice?

This isn’t an argument about conspiracy. It doesn’t require secret meetings or hidden puppet masters. It asks a simpler question.

What happens when different institutions respond to the same incentives?

Because patterns don’t require coordination. Sometimes they only require rewards that point everyone in the same direction.

More Brands. Fewer Owners.

Modern life offers more products than any generation before us could imagine. That’s real progress.

But abundance isn’t the same as independence.

For decades, mergers and acquisitions have quietly reshaped the American economy. Companies that once fought each other now sit inside the same corporate portfolios. Familiar brands remain because consumers recognize them. Ownership changes because investors reward scale.

The eyewear industry is one of the clearest examples. Brands that appear to compete often trace back to the same corporate ownership. The beer industry tells a similar story. So do airlines. So do meatpacking companies.

Different products. The same direction.

None of this means large companies are inherently bad. Large companies can lower prices, invest in research, and distribute products more efficiently than smaller competitors. Those are real benefits. But every benefit comes with a tradeoff.

Competition isn’t measured by how many logos fill a shelf. It’s measured by how many independent organizations make the decisions behind those logos. History has wrestled with this question before.

When Standard Oil grew so large that it dominated its industry, lawmakers concluded that competition itself needed protection. The Sherman Antitrust Act wasn’t simply about breaking up one company. It reflected a broader principle.

Markets work best when power can still be challenged. That debate never disappeared. It simply found new industries.

Two Parties. One Structure.

Politics isn’t business. Its purpose is representation, not profit. But institutions often reveal themselves through structure rather than purpose. Every presidential election begins with dozens of candidates. By Election Day, almost every path leads to the same two choices. Republican. Democrat.

The parties disagree on issues that genuinely matter.
  • Taxes.
  • Immigration.
  • Foreign policy.
  • Abortion.
  • Regulation.

Those differences deserve to be taken seriously. But they don’t answer a different question. Why has the competitive structure remained so stable for so long?

Political scientists have an answer. Duverger’s Law. In winner-take-all systems, voters eventually gravitate toward two dominant parties because voting strategically becomes more practical than voting ideally.

The rules shape the incentives. The incentives shape the outcome.

Ballot access laws, campaign finance, and debate rules reinforce that structure. None of them eliminate competition. Together, they narrow it. The ballot still offers a choice.

The range of viable choices shrinks long before Election Day. The pattern starts looking familiar.

Consumers choose among brands owned by fewer companies. Voters choose among candidates produced by fewer political organizations.

Different systems. The same incentives.

The Business of Conflict

Markets reward familiarity. Politics rewards loyalty. Media rewards attention.

Those incentives increasingly reinforce one another.

Conflict keeps audiences watching. Audiences attract advertisers. Algorithms learn what keeps people engaged. The cycle feeds itself.

This doesn’t require journalists trying to divide the country. It requires businesses responding to business incentives.

A fight between two sides is easier to package than a conversation involving ten. Complexity loses. Conflict wins.

Why It Works

The final piece isn’t corporate. Or political. It’s human.

Our brains look for shortcuts. We trust familiar brands. We return to familiar news sources. We identify with familiar political tribes.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argued that more options don’t always make people feel freer. Beyond a certain point, endless choices create fatigue instead of confidence.

Daniel Kahneman showed that our minds rely on mental shortcuts because they have to.

Those shortcuts help us navigate the world. They also make familiar choices remarkably powerful.

The easiest choice to shape…is the one that still feels like a choice.

The Pattern

By themselves, none of these examples prove very much. Together, they tell a remarkably consistent story.

  • Markets concentrate ownership.
  • Politics concentrates viable competition.
  • Media concentrates attention.
  • Human beings concentrate familiarity.

Different institutions. Different histories. The same incentives.

The Verdict

Competition is how free societies distribute power. It disciplines markets. Challenges governments. Rewards innovation.

Without competition, institutions stop earning trust. They begin inheriting it.

That’s why the appearance of competition deserves as much attention as competition itself.

A system doesn’t have to eliminate alternatives. It only has to make meaningful alternatives harder to reach.

The shelf still looks full. The ballot still looks competitive. The debate still looks balanced. Until you begin asking a different question.

Not…“What are my choices?” But…“Who decided these were my choices?”

That’s where institutions become visible.

History rarely announces the moment freedom begins to narrow.

It happens one decision at a time. One merger. One acquisition. One election cycle. One incentive.

Until the boundaries become so familiar that they stop feeling like boundaries at all.

Every institution develops incentives to preserve itself.
  • Corporations.
  • Political parties.
  • Media organizations.
  • Universities.
  • Bureaucracies.

That’s not corruption. It’s organizational behavior.

The responsibility isn’t to eliminate institutions. It’s to keep them accountable.

To make sure competition remains real.To make sure alternatives remain possible.

Because once competition becomes performance…freedom begins shrinking long before anyone notices.

The most powerful systems rarely eliminate choice. They simply become good at deciding which choices remain.

Older Entries